Halle Berry

Good looks never stopped her from attempting emotionally raw roles

You can't not watch Halle Berry. Whether she's turning herself inside out in Monster's Ball or, in a comparably agonized, triumphal moment, accepting the Oscar for that performance, the first African-American best actress in the Academy's history, Berry gets to you. Racial milestones aside, in this era of slick cinema product, there is something a little miraculous about a lovely actress whose commitment to raw, true emotion is never less than total. Warren Beatty, who cast her and costarred with her in his antic, heartfelt Bulworth (1998), says, "She has an enormous range, from the comic to the tragic, and her beauty transcends the physical."

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So if you're in the market for some breaking-down-the-walls therapy or just a proverbial good cry, watch Monster's Ball, Losing Isaiah, and Things We Lost in the Fire back to back to back. That is to say, Halle Berry falling in love with the former corrections officer who executed her death row husband; abandoning and then attempting to reclaim her baby boy; and trying to hold it together for her kids' sake when all she wants to do is crack into a million pieces after her paragon of a husband is murdered. You feel purged; how in the world does Halle Berry feel? "I'm fantastic," she says in a disarmingly light, girlish voice. Berry, 42, says she is in an excellent place these days, romantically involved with a decadeyounger man, Versace model Gabriel Aubry, who is the father of her child, seven-month-old Nahla Ariela. But let's be clear. Berry is a pain artist who digs deep into the well-reported dislocations in her past to bring a character to life. "I've had a life full of great highs but also great lows," she says. "My well is deep. And my process is figuring out how to funnel my own pain, my own rage, through a character. When I can do that in a healthy way, it's like I won the lottery." To her mind, there's nothing accidental about the heavier roles she takes on. "When I say yes to a script," she says, "it's because there's something in that character that I need to exorcise in my life."

Berry makes movies the way other people throw the I Ching. When she shot Losing Isaiah in 1994, she says she realized she wasn't ready to be a mother, an acceptance mirrored by her character's decision to hand back her child to adoptive mother Jessica Lange at film's end. More than a decade later, when she played a mom in Things We Lost in the Fire, she says, "I learned that I desperately wanted to be a mother and that I somehow had to make that manifest in my life. I got pregnant shortly after that." She could write a dissertation about the personal resonances bound up in next year's Frankie and Alice, which she also produced. The biracial daughter of a Liverpool nurse and an African-American hospital attendant, Berry plays an inner-city woman who splits off a second personality, a white racist.

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It takes nothing away from her soulful transit through cinema to acknowledge that Berry's dropdead gorgeousness must help explain how the more commercial roles—the Bond Girl in Die Another Day, Storm in the X-Men films—found her. But even an action flick such as Swordfish (2001) plays its part in her master plan. She says the scene in which she flashes her breasts at a stunned Hugh Jackman vanquished one of her "real demons" about on-screen nudity. ("I knew it was the Halle Berry breast scene," she says, "and I knew it was gratuitous and I knew what I was getting out of it.") That paved the way, she believes, for Monster's Ball, especially her sex scene with Billy Bob Thornton, which is probably the most naked depiction of female sexuality (this being Berry, grief-and-rage-fueled sexuality) that any A-list actress has ever committed to film. Recalls director Marc Forster, "It was the only time in my life as a director that I suddenly got shivers over me. I felt like I was watching these two people almost like a voyeur, like I was witnessing real life." How could Berry resist? "Usually when I'm scared of something," she says, "that means I have to walk right into the flame."

ELLE: Name one actress peer you admire. HB: Kate Winslet is always naked, sitting on a toilet, running buck-naked. She's free. I want to be the kind of actress who can really be comfortable with my body like that.

ELLE: Was Dorothy Dandridge a role model for you? HB: I feel like we remember Marilyn Monroe and Ava Gardner and Grace Kelly. And Dorothy Dandridge was right on a par with them. But she was a black woman trying to make it in an industry where there was no place for her. I think I've always felt that way. I've tried to carve out my own niche, because there was no one before me who went as far as I was dreaming of going.

ELLE: In Things We Lost in the Fire, you play a black woman married to a white man and nothing is made of that. For a woman of color in Hollywood, is that progress? HB: Absolutely. And that part was very normal for me, being raised by a white mother. Only when I got to junior high did it become something I had to defend or explain or even think about. Now with a black man running for president, I think we're moving toward this great racial divide becoming a thing of the past. If I don't fully experience that in my lifetime, I really believe my daughter will.

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